Whitcomb: Employers’ Rights; Meet SAM; Censorship at MIT; Another ‘Twilight Struggle’

Sunday, October 24, 2021

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

In the cloud-gray mornings
I heard the herons flying;
And when I came into my garden,
My silken outer-garment
Trailed over withered leaves.
A dried leaf crumbles at a touch,
But I have seen many Autumns
With herons blowing like smoke
Across the sky.

“Hoar-Frost,’’ by Amy Lowell (1874-1925)

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‘‘Vox populi, vox humbug’’

-- Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman (1820-1891) in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War

 

 

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PHOTO: file

Ah, last week I saw the first trees I’ve seen this season that have lost all their leaves. They looked beautiful in their spectral, skeleton-like way.

 

The woods and fields are lovely for walking at this time of year but until the first hard freeze, you can get Lyme disease from ticks out there. Still, there’s been maybe promising research on how to slow this disease. This includes vaccinating field mice by leaving out vaccine-infused food, which would be mean fewer mice from which ticks could spread the disease. Another approach would be to leave antibiotic-infused food for the rodents. But there are possible dangers to putting this stuff out in the environment. Stay tuned.

 

How slow the search for a Lyme disease preventive seems and how fast the COVID vaccines came out after that disease appeared! But those vaccines were based on many years of virological research.

 

Hit this link:

 

 

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PHOTO: file

I love the hypocrisy of the GOPQ’s demand that companies, schools, agencies, hospitals, etc., not be allowed to impose vaccination mandates on their employees to protect all employees and the public. This is presented as an affront to the “freedom” of the anti-vaxxers (to infect others and themselves).

 

But such public-health measures have been standard for years. (George Washington ordered his troops to be vaccinated against smallpox.) And no one is forcing these dangerous, ignorance-driven anti-vaxxers to work anywhere.

 

Employers have always had a set of rules for the behavior of their workers – and the freedom to enforce them. If the workers don’t like them, they can quit! In a free society, employers can use their judgment on whom to employ, and people are free to look for other work if they don’t like those rules.

 

Since when is there mandatory employment of irresponsible people?


Don’t the cultists believe in an open job market? Free enterprise?

 

Play It, SAM

 

The Serve America Movement (SAM), a kind of new “big tent’’ party, seeks to reform American politics and government by taking practical, nonideological approaches to public policy. It attracts people who had been moderate Republicans before the  Trump cult took over their party, as well as centrist Democrats, in a bid to pull the country out of the gridlock and demagoguery that has beset it in recent years.

 

SAM seeks to gradually get its candidates on the ballot across the country. And its leaders argue that America would be much better off with a multiparty system, which would help it escape the corrupting and gridlock-creating  GOPQ-Democratic duopoly.

 

See HERE

 

Southern Republicans, descendants of the old Southern Democrats (aka Dixiecrats), have been voting for the GOPQ for a half-century. As a result, Southern states remain the poorest in the country as a result of underfunded public education, weak social services and racial discrimination. The aim is to keep taxes low, especially for the rich. But sales taxes (which are regressive) are high. Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama have the highest such levies in the country.

 

 

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PHOTO: file

So Much for Academic Freedom

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has canceled a lecture to have been given by distinguished University of Chicago geophysicist and climate scientist Dorian Abbot on whether the climates of planets outside of our solar system can sustain life. Crazily enough, Professor Abbot’s talk was prevented because some identity obsessives at MIT and elsewhere were angry that he criticized the current obsession of many colleges and universities with “diversity, equity and inclusion’’  -- in admissions and hiring – that is, as the institutions define those three qualities. He has suggested that they may be creating serious new inequities in the process. Maybe, maybe not.

 

But surely a university as rich and powerful as MIT, a place that like most institutions of higher education, is supposed to be devoted to free inquiry and debate, however unpopular (or untrendy), can do better than this. Pathetic!

 

I remember vividly how Dartmouth College allowed the racist and demagogic Alabama Gov. and presidential candidate George Wallace to speak at the college in 1967. Yelling protesters interrupted his speech, which he ended early, after which the car he was in  was surrounded by protesters in what came to be called “The Wallace Riot.’’ But the college admirably defended his right to speak.

 

And, in a commencement address at the same college in 1953, President Eisenhower, a moderate Republican, told the graduates, in an attack on  the McCarthyism that had infected his party:

 

“Don't join the book burners. Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book....”

 

That’s what you should hear at a university. (Ike, by the way, also served as president of Columbia University.)

 

 

Apocalypse Not

The imposition of highway tolls on trucks passing through Rhode Island, in order to help pay to fix the state’s decrepit bridges and roads, was inevitably accompanied by trucking companies threatening to bypass the state (though that would have cost them money in burning up extra fuel). It didn’t happen. It kinda reminds me of the scaremongering that erupts every time that there’s a move to raise the low, and very rarely raised, federal minimum wage.

 

 

Needed Housing

A developer wants to put up a 24-unit residential building on Eighth Street in Providence’s Hope neighborhood. Well, I’m sure that neighbors will complain, but the city needs a lot of new housing to control spiraling housing costs. It’s unclear if the units will be rentals or condos. I hope they’ll be rentals, for which there’s a much greater socio-economic need, in Providence and around America.

 

Hit this link for a look at the project:

 

Meanwhile, housing prices are finally slowing in Greater Boston as more and more potential buyers find themselves tapped out in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. (Of course, this reflects something good, too: The area is one of the most prosperous in the world.) And things are cooling in Rhode Island, too.

 

We may be toward the end of this latest cycle of housing mania. I’ve watched at least three of these speculative waves. Toward the end, we start to get letters, emails and phone calls offering to buy our house immediately, often sight unseen, except nowadays for photos on Zillow.

 

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How about creating an indoor and architecturally distinguished year-round market, sort of like Boston’s Quincy Market, in downtown Providence that features food stalls selling a wide range of food, especially the stuff that’s locally sourced, and a range of other activities? (I was at Quincy Market a few months ago.)

 

 

Testing the Pandemic Tests

With the severe disruption of learning caused by the pandemic, states’ education leaders must grapple with how to look at standardized statewide test results. After all,  COVID-19 has left many students far behind where they otherwise would have been. How to catch up, if only a bit?

 

A Washington Post article noted of the tests conducted last spring across America:

 

“Scores declined across the board, and historically underserved students fell further behind. So far, there’s little evidence demonstrating that data from this round of standardized exams are being used to address the pandemic’s expected impact, as testing advocates had promised.’’

 

“Now it’s time to assess the assessors. Were spring 2021 exams really helpful in promoting academic quality and educational equity? Or was this just another politically driven ‘testing for the sake of testing’ exercise?’’

 

To read The Post’s article, please hit this link:

 

 

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Providence Place Mall PHOTO: GoLocal

Co-Working in Big Stores?

A future use of much of Providence Place?  The New York Times ran a story the other week about setting up co-working spaces in big stores, mixing that use with shopping that survives the retail apocalypse. But such design problems as the lack of windows in most big stores make it unlikely that this idea will spread very much.

 

Given the continuing “affordable-housing” crisis, the idea of converting these structures to housing has possibilities, but that would require very expensive and complicated changes, such as blowing out walls to create windows and, of course, putting up innumerable internal walls and reconfiguring plumbing,  electrical, heating and air-conditioning systems.

 

Maybe using the space for schools, or even light assembly, would make more sense. Because of international supply-chain issues and increasing concern that the U.S. depends far too much on goods made abroad, we’ll be seeing more manufacturing returning to America. Wouldn’t it be ironic if some of the massive structure of the Providence Place mall, which was designed by architect Friedrich St. Florian to recall  New England’s 19th  Century factories, ends up housing a bunch of – small factories?   

 

Let’s see what architects and interior designers come up with.

 

Hit this link to read The Times’s story:

 

 

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Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy PHOTO: CC 2.0

Cold War II, Continued

Somewhat recalling the partnerships of the major Axis powers – Hirohito’s Japan, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy -- in World War II, Russia’s fascist dictatorship and China’s weird fascist/communist/Orwellian regime have been conducting joint military exercises and engaging in other cooperation. They, with such smaller allied tyrannies as North Korea and Iran, seek to scare the industrialized democracies in general and members of NATO in particular.

 

After the hopes that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the opening of China to world business, we’re again in what John F. Kennedy once called a “long twilight struggle” to protect democracy against the very same countries we saw as our biggest foes in the first Cold War. (Yes, yes, I know Russia was part of the Soviet Union in the first Cold War but it was far and away the biggest part.)

 

But in the long run, the two authoritarians’ alliance may collapse as border and other disputes arise between Russia, with its remarkably small population (about 146 million) and pathetic (except for fossil fuels) economy, and China, with a huge economy and about 1.4 billion people.

 

As with the first Cold War, we must endure the costs of confrontation as we seek to protect our democracies and open societies from Russian and Chinese efforts to undermine us.

 

xxx


A dictatorship, like Russia (again, the population of only 146 million), continuously lies to help keep itself in power. And so while the official  COVID death count there is about 220,000, experts have calculated that the real number is about 700,000. The current U.S. death count is probably around 900,000 in a country of around 330 million.

 

One of the reasons that the Russian death count is so high is that vaccination rates are so low because few people  -- an even smaller percentage than in America! --  trust the government when it tells the public to get vaccinated.  An estimated 35 percent of Russians are fully vaccinated, compared to an estimated 60 percent of Americans. After all, the Putin regime engages in massive suppression of truth and facts and the public knows it. Lack of trust is one of the major characteristics of living in a dictatorship, and in a country that’s moving toward one.

 

Some Americans drawn to would-be dictators might bear that in mind.

 

 

Festival of Trees

“The thousand fine points and tops of the trees delight me; they are the plumes and standards and bayonets of a host that marched to victory over the earth.’’

-- From Thoreau’s Jan. 23, 1852 journal

 

Living as we do in a well-watered part of the North Temperate Zone, we’re fortunate to have so many kinds of beautiful trees – deciduous and evergreen -- around us.

 

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) adored trees and wrote about them copiously, expertly and emotionally in his journals, mostly set in and around Concord, Mass. Richard Higgins’s book Thoreau and The Language of Trees displays this brilliantly, although it’s too bad that there apparently wasn’t enough money to include some color photographs in addition to the superb black-and-white photos and illustrations; some of the latter are sketches by Thoreau himself.

 

 

A Refugee’s Dream

After its pandemic hiatus, The Providence Committee on Foreign Relations is embarking on its exciting dinner speaker series for 2021-2022 at the Hope Club, in Providence.

 

The first speaker, coming Tuesday, Oct. 26, is Omar Bah, who fled The Gambia after having been declared a wanted man because of articles he wrote criticizing the  country’s dictator. Inspired by his experience, Mr. Bah founded the Refugee Dream Center in Providence to offer other refugees in  Rhode Island post-resettlement support.

 

Preview his amazing story via a PBS profile by hitting this link:

 

The PCFR, chaired by healthcare professional and state Rep. Barbara Ann Fenton-Fung, says: “We're happy to have Omar join us on  Tuesday night at the Hope Club, starting at 6 p.m.  Due to COVID-related issues, tickets must be purchased by Sunday night.  As a reminder, the PCFR  has collectively agreed to require proof of vaccination to attend our events this fall, which will be requested at the door.  Thank you for your cooperation in advance.”

 

For tickets, please hit this link:

 

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